Trends of launch game review scores across generations

by JC Fletcher on Dec 14th 2012 1:30PM

It can be really interesting to look through a bunch of well-organized data even (especially) if there are no easy conclusions to be drawn from it. Gamasutra's gathering of historical Metacritic/Gamerankings review data for home console launch games is just such a collection of interesting, difficult to interpret numbers.

Aggregated looks at review scores for the launches of systems from the PlayStation to the Wii U show that the PS3, Wii, and Wii U's launch games had the widest spread of review scores – a phenomenon we might attribute to the larger number of reviewing press outlets that were present for those launches.

The average review score was highest for GameCube, and lowest for PlayStation. And surprisingly, the Wii U has almost as many US launch games as the most populated platform, the PS2. That's at least one auspicious statistic for the Wii U's launch lineup, even if many of the games in it are ports.

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Steve Wozniak secretly submitted Tetris scores to Nintendo Power

by David Hinkle on Jul 20th 2012 5:30PM

Aside from his tech eminence having helped found Apple, Steve Wozniak is apparently also a pretty sick Tetris player. He only plays the original Game Boy port, and admits he submitted his scores to Nintendo Power back in the day.

"I was always #1 in the Nintendo Power listings in 1988, and after they said my name had been in there too many times and wouldn't print it again, I spelled my name backwards (Evets Kainzow) and sent in a photo of my score," Wozniak said in a comment on a Gizmodo piece about him. "When I got the magazine, I'd forgotten doing this and was worried that a foreigner from the next city over (I used Saratoga instead of Los Gatos so they wouldn't catch on) had a score up in my range. I got worried but then remembered my joke. Whew! It's in some old issue of Nintendo Power magazine."

Reddit user polar0ids was quick to call Woz's bluff, but it (unsurprisingly) turns out to be a true story. As seen here in this thread, the story checks out. There's Evets Kainzow's score: 546,145 points.

[Image credit]

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